Politics

Political opinion & commentary on current events, elections, legislation, and policy.

I’m not going to bother going over the gory details of the national disgrace that unfolded in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday. It’s been hashed out over and over again, and there’s nothing to be gained by putting it under a microscope here. But I do have some observations that I’d like to share. First, there are a lot of people out there who want to punch Nazis. Fair enough, I’ve wanted to do the same thing since I first watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. My zeal for crushing National Socialists only grew with my first play-through of Wolfenstein 3D and then after learning my maternal ancestry is virtually impossible to trace because of the Holocaust. But in a climate of escalating violence and hate, is more violence and hate really the answer? Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t think so, and I’m inclined to agree with him. You can punch a Nazi in the face as many times as you want, and it won’t persuade him to abandon his…

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, reports Business Insider. Conservative journalist Charles Johnson told the Daily Caller that he arranged the meeting between Rohrabacher and the WikiLeaks founder on Wednesday because Assange hoped to strike a deal with the United States so that he can stop living in asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where he has resided since August 2010.

While Libertarian Party chairman Nicholas Sarwark has frequently embarrassed himself during his achievement-less tenure in his post, he has stooped to a new low. Sarwark is working with professed communists to throw libertarian icon, Tom Woods, under the bus as a racist. Using the fallout from “Unite the Right” to attack his critics, Sarwark–assisted by openly-leftist LP members–dug up a quote from a podcast that took place many years ago where Tom Woods congratulated Christopher Cantwell for attacking figures such as Jeffrey Tucker and other libertarians who were attempting to inject leftism into the movement.

Crews removed Confederate statues from city parks and public squares across Baltimore shortly after midnight on Wednesday, according to the New York Times. The City Council unanimously passed a resolution to tear down several monuments after a white nationalist rally to defend similar statues turned deadly in Charlottesville, VA over the weekend. Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh told the Baltimore Sun that she was acting in the “best interest of [her] city” to remove the statues without announcement and under the cover of darkness, citing public safety fears as her reason for doing so. “The mayor has the right to protect her city,” Pugh said in a statement Wednesday. “For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation. We don’t need that in Baltimore.” Pugh, a staunch Democrat, said she has been working towards the removal of the statutes…

In case any question remained as to whether non-leftist and paleolibertarian voices were welcomed in the Libertarian Party, LP Chairman Nicholas Sarwark made it clear in a recent Twitter battle with liberty movement voices associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The institute’s President, Jeff Deist, was singled out in particular for ridicule. Attempting to deflect from his critics’ accusations of the LP being nothing more than a gargantuan black hole defined by a puerile obsession with marijuana, Sarwark shamefully accused the Mises Institute of “being the preferred choice of actual Nazis.“ Sarwark’s sensationalist accusation is distasteful not only for its inaccurate characterization of the Mises Institute as an institution, but it’s particularly insulting to the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises himself, a spirit Murray Rothbard sought to preserve and maintain when he founded the Mises Institute along with Lew Rockwell in the memory of his mentor back in 1982. The Mises Institute is literally an organization founded by a Jew to preserve the legacy of primarily Jewish Austrian…

The day before “Unite the Right” was set to commence, spirits were at an all-time high. The torch demonstration was a shocking and unexpected success. What looked to be in excess of 500 people gathered and marched through the University of Virginia campus. They even cornered ANTIFA, who in their complete bewilderment even held a large sign upside down in a hilarious display. Going into the rally, the organizers seemed confident that it would be a tremendous success. Those hopes were dashed almost instantaneously. Before the rally began, it was clear that the cops–presumably at the behest of the leftist Charlottesville mayor and the Governor of Virginia–were not going to allow it to happen. Corralling both groups together purposefully to exacerbate the threat, the cops allowed a public safety nightmare to unfold that unjustly denied free speech rights protected under the 1st Amendment to the protesters. What escalated from there put every Charlottesville resident into serious peril, and three people ended up dead after a panicked individual ran down…

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a prominent liberal civil rights organization, has demanded that President Donald Trump fire White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon in response to the violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, according to a bizarre statement released by the group on Saturday. “We call on the President to take the tangible step to remove Steve Bannon – a well-known white supremacist leader – from his team of advisers,” the NAACP declared. “Bannon serves as a symbol of white nationalism and his high place in the White House only energizes that sentiment,” they continued.

To hear Hillary Clinton’s considering becoming a lay-preacher has created a social media firestorm of comments and opinions. The biggest challenge in addressing whether her qualifications as a lay-preacher are valid is the likelihood that her supporters are standing by, ready to pounce on anyone who questions the former First lady’s interest in sharing her faith. Regardless, even under the threat of public scrutiny, some real questions need to be asked. If Clinton is serious about this latest endeavor, her actions and political stances will certainly come into question. Not to beat a dead horse, but she was responsible for a number of poor choices and judgments which have gained national infamy; from the infamous email investigation to shady dealings with certain foreign leaders and so on. To this day, she’s admitted no wrong doings, even after former FBI director James Comey exposed multiple lies regarding her email server. While scriptures are clear that ‘no one’s perfect, not even one,’ it’s also important to note that Christians are called to…

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has once again fallen out of Trump’s favor, and his job could well be at risk, according to reports by Axios‘s Jonathan Swan and Politico‘s Josh Dawsey, Eliana Johnson, and Ben White. Trump appears to have two main gripes with Bannon. Firstly, he suspects Bannon to be responsible for the negative leaks about National Security H.R. McMaster to conservative publications such as Breitbart, which was previously headed by Bannon. Bannon reportedly believes “believes the globalists pose the greatest internal threat to the Trump presidency, and could send it veering off course with foreign interventions,” according to Swan. McMaster, a prominent hawk, has advocated for increased U.S. intervention in Syria and Afghanistan, which Bannon believes would be a break from Trump’s ‘America First’ campaign message. These leaks have also inflamed White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who was apparently “horrified” at the critical tirade against McMaster by outlets sympathetic to Bannon. The Politico report goes further still, stating that “several presidential aides said they expect…

In their desperation, leftists are doubling down on their immense hypocrisy. Having proclaimed the virtues of civil rights for generations, the left is now turning their backs on their principles and openly discriminating against white people who they suspect to be “racist.” In the town of Charlottesville, VA–a leftist stronghold–a group of pro-white protesters ranging from identitarians to southern nationalists to anarchocapitalists is organizing under the banner “Unite the Right.” They are set to demonstrate tomorrow, but many impediments stand in their way. Unwilling to let the protesters peacefully rally in favor of the Robert E. Lee statue in Emancipation Park, organizers first had their permit for the rally revoked before leftist businesses joined in the witch hunt. First, Airbnb began denying lodging services to anyone they claimed was a white supremacist. Additionally, rally speaker Baked Alaska was kicked from an Uber car because he was recognized by the driver. The discrimination continued from there as local businesses started putting up signs indicating that all hate mongers or those…

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” in Patrick Henry’s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation. At the very least, and after 230 years of just such “consolidation,” it’s safe to say that the original Constitution is a dead letter. The natural- and common law traditions, once lodestars for lawmakers, have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute. However much one shovels the muck of lawmaking aside, natural justice and the Founders’ original intent remain buried too deep to exhume.

Danny Tarkanian announced that he will challenge Senator Dean Heller in Nevada’s Republican primary during “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, according to Politico. “So many people have contacted me in the past few months, saying, ‘You got to run against Dean Heller,’” said Tarkanian on the morning news program. “They understand, like I do, that we’re never going to make America great again unless we have senators in office supporting President Trump. Dean Heller wasn’t just one of the first Never-Trumpers in the state of Nevada, he was one of the most influential. He actually helped Hillary Clinton win the state of Nevada.” On the show, he cited Heller’s lack of support in President Donald Trump as his inspiration for mounting a primary challenge, pointing to Heller’s record on the Senate Republican effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Heller, who has served in the Senate since 2011, is considered one of the most vulnerable Republican senators in the country up for reelection during the 2018 midterms as the only…

A dispute recently erupted at a conference sponsored by the Mises Institute between right- and left-leaning libertarians, that is, between Jeff Deist, President of the Mises Institute, and Daniel Horowitz, who is something of a fixture at CATO. Since Tom Woods has provided a spirited defense of Deist’s position, which calls for a combination of liberty with traditional social morality and traditional community identities, I needn’t rush to Jeff’s defense. Although I’ve never (to my knowledge) met the Director of the Mises Institute, I fully share his perspective on the necessary preconditions for living in a free society under a constitutionally limited government. And I find the attacks by Horowitz on Deist and Ron Paul to be over-the-top, particularly the efforts to equate a respect for traditional civic morality with Nazism. I also agree with Shane Trejo, writing here that Horowitz’s rage against communal loyalties among gentile nations rings hollow, given his own intense Jewish nationalism. Let me quote Shane’s brilliant put-down of Horowitz’s name-calling lest my paraphrase fails…

Certain quarters of the libertarian universe are in an absolute tizzy because Mises Institute President Jeff Deist invoked “blood and soil” in a recent speech. In the minds of some PC brain-addled libertarians, this is clearly an indication that the speaker was dog whistling to Nazis. This is both profoundly clueless and shameless PC grandstanding. Proof that “blood and soil” can only be some sort of cryptic reference to Nazism is supposedly supplied by a Google search of the term which brings back a lot of links to “wrongthink” websites. I respect many libertarians. I have many libertarian friends, both real and virtual, but too many modern libertarians inhabit a world that exists only in their heads, and they can be grossly unfamiliar with the intellectual (and real) world outside the echo chamber that is their segment of libertarianism. “Blood and soil” is, in fact, a rather mundane formulation that is used to express an undeniable aspect of reality. To deny that attachment to blood and soil is a…

Nearing the end of his life, Christopher Hitchens no longer considered himself a Trotskyite, or even a socialist. But he never repudiated his Vietnam-era politics, and to his dying day praised the “heroic” Vietcong, despite Ho Chi Minh’s obvious Stalinist-style politics and how said politics were murderously applied after Saigon fell (Hitchens, like others in the New Left, blamed Minh and Pol Pot’s savagery on America’s relentless bombing campaign). But Hitchens departed from the New Left from the very beginning by criticizing one of their sacred cows: Fidel Castro. Like Lee Harvey Oswald (who, as a gun-brandishing Marxist-spouting deadbeat, would have fit easily into the Weathermen), the New Left lauded the Cuban dictator for his scrappy opposition against “fascist” American imperialism and for his “purer” form of Marxism over the Soviet syetem. For them, Castro was worthy to stand beside their other idols, Ho Chi Minh (many of the violence-practicing New Left proclaimed themselves “America’s Vietcong”) and Mao. But Hitchens kept his head about Castro. Like many of his…

A disappointed Republican donor in Virginia has filed a lawsuit against the national and state Republican Parties for failing to repeal ObamaCare, according to The Hill. The retired attorney, Bob Heghmann, filed the suit in U.S. District Court on Thursday, alleging that the GOP raised millions of dollars in donations despite having knowledge that the party would not be able to repeal ObamaCare. In the suit, he claimed the Republican Party “has been engaged in a pattern of racketeering which involves massive fraud perpetrated on Republican voters and contributors as well as some Independents and Democrats.”

Predictably, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have already pooh-poohed President Trump’s July 26th LGBTQ directives, banning the politicized transgender production from the theater of war.Why “predictably” (preachy, too)? Whether Republicans like it or not, the military is government; it works like government; is financed like government, and is marred by the same inherent malignancies of government. Like all government-run divisions and departments, the US military is manacled by multiculturalism, feminism and all manner of outré sexual politics, affirmative action, and political correctness that can kill. And has killed.

In a phone call to Mexico’s in-over-his-head head-of-state, Enrique Pena Nieto, President Trump said he won in New Hampshire because it is a “drug infested den.” Not long after, NH Governor Chris Sununu weighed in with a carefully measured response, one tailor made to suit the political dissociative identity disorder of a state that votes overwhelmingly for Republican legislators but sends a fully Democratic delegation to the US Congress. And sometimes New Hampshire will elect a Democrat governor and other times it will elect a Republican; from time to time, it’s a Sununu. No one can ever really be sure what New Hampshire will do next but there’s always an exception to every rule. New Hampshire does a lot of drugs. You can bet on that. I know because I live there and as a resident of the “603,” I can tell you without any equivocation that what President Trump said about the Granite State is absolutely true. I’ve seen it and lived within it for many years. I…

CNN’s Jim Acosta went on a rampage during yesterday’s press briefing toward Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller while he was discussing the RAISE Act, an immigration reform bill. “This is the largest proposed reform to our immigration policy in half a century,” Miller began. “The most important question when it comes to the U.S. immigration system is who gets a green card. A green card is the golden ticket of U.S. immigration.” Immigration reform has been, since the campaign began, one of the areas of main concern for the President Donald Trump and his administration. For some odd reason, it continues to be the most partisan issue out there, and liberal journalists are losing their objectivity over the issue. Jim Acosta made it very clear to Advisor Miller that the RAISE Act was just not going to cut it from his point of view. As he continuously interrupted Miller, Acosta attempted to paint the picture of racism. He even mentioned the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

The fallout from the “Liberty Summer” campaigns continues on. Young Americans for Liberty leaders have been selling their activists on these campaigns all summer (and continue to do so), but they have not turned out as expected. The “Clean Mi Govt” part-time legislature initiative headed by Brian Calley continues to receive terrible press in Michigan while Luther Strange, a Mitch McConnell crony who is receiving help from YAL activists as well for his Senate campaign, has a bevy of scandals to deal with as he tries to keep his seat against more conservative opponents. For “Clean Mi Govt,” the entire campaign imploded after numerous reports of fraud and incompetence surfaced from YAL activists and other observers. Every signature for the part-time legislature that was captured by YAL activists was scrapped, making their work a complete waste of time. Each signature they collected was thrown out, and activists were sent home early with very little to show for their efforts. The campaign was funded almost entirely by dark money, and…

If I were to draw up a list of the problems facing my country, and then to discuss their nature and possible solutions, I might be starting work on a rather long book. Instead, I will confine myself to what I think are the two most immediately pressing, and that are within the direct control of the British Government. These are our withdrawal from the European Union and the state of our so far uncontested culture war. I begin with Europe. When we voted, in June 2016, to leave the European Union, we were plainly willing an end without willing any means to that end. I think the consensus among those who voted to leave was that we should have a government, elected by and fully accountable to ourselves, that would set immigration and trade policies in our own interest. For various reasons, I choose not here to discuss immigration. Our most reasonable trade policy by my estimation involves free trade with the world in services and manufactured goods,…

To those who enjoyed the Scaramucci show and are sad that it has come to an end, please consider the old adage: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Anthony Scaramucci came into the Trump administration like a knight in shining armor. Besieged with constant infiltration, leaks and seemingly unprecedented turmoil throughout his first six months, President Trump needed a man to come in like gang busters and take care of business. Replacing Sean Spicer, Scaramucci came in as White House communications director guns a-blazin’ with a style so brash and confrontational that it may have made the POTUS himself blush. Scaramucci Dice Clay, I dubbed him, because of the obvious similarities between he and the insanely foul 1980’s comedy powerhouse. Trump said that at some point we would be officially sick of winning, and he wasn’t kidding. The American public wanted a shake-up, and by God, we got what we wanted good and hard with Scaramucci, as the legendary pundit H.L. Mencken would have…

As soon as John McCain was diagnosed with brain cancer, a bipartisan chorus of praise for the career politician emerged. Whether McCain is the good man and good “public servant” that he is now being made out to be are empirical questions. The evidence with respect to both is overwhelmingly in the negative. Since a disastrous public servant is and must be a person with bad character, i.e. not a good person, we needn’t even look at McCain’s private life in order to see that he is neither a good man nor a good public servant. Let’s take his foreign policy “achievements” alone. No one, including McCain himself, denies that he is a war “hawk.” Indeed, as can be gotten readily enough by sites like Geopolitics Alert, one would be hard pressed to find an American military conflict or potential conflict on behalf of which McCain did not advocate vigorously. Whether it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya or Iran; Nigeria, Sudan, or Mali; Bosnia, Kosovo, or Ukraine; Russia,…

As Hillary Clinton continues her “excuse” tour regarding her decisive loss to Trump, ranging from the now well-worn Russian collusion thesis to weak support from Obama during the campaign to an ineffective and shattered DNC, many Democrats have sought to acquaint her with the painful reality that she was simply a bad candidate. Such frankness, however, has not attached itself to a cherished liberal history lesson regarding an eerily similar 1950 California Senate race between Republican Congressman Richard Nixon and Democratic Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas. For liberals then and now, Nixon’s victory was achieved by his métier of red-baiting and character assassination, with a heavy dose of misogyny thrown into the mix. To encapsulate all of Nixon’s admittedly thuggish attacks on Gahagan, liberals have cited his infamous mixture of anti-feminism with anti-communism, when he bellowed about Gahagan’s politics, that “she is pink right down to her underwear” (a statement the Nixon campaign borrowed verbatim from Gahagan’s Democratic primary opponent, Sheldon Boddy). Although Nixon’s dodgy at best character, ruthlessly dishonest…

Libertarians have typically been known as standing for freedom of expression, but that is going to change if Elizabeth Nolan Brown has her way. The sex-positive Reason contributor, who co-founded Feminists For Liberty with the vehemently anti-libertarian Cathy Reisenwitz, is bringing social justice warrior-style thought policing into the libertarian movement. And for what reason? Because her little feelings were hurt over a silly joke. This whining Feminazi, with stereotypically dyed hair and all, started a pathetic Twitter crusade on Saturday because a Young Americans for Liberty activist made a harmless joke on Twitter about women making sandwiches. Her goal was to create an Internet lynch mob of other soft-skinned, attention-starved women and their sorry beta male enablers to make it so the young man couldn’t get hired in the libertarian community (or anywhere else for that matter). Brown is under the employ of Reason Magazine, where she writes about riveting topics such as “gender anarchy” and the virtues of women who sell their bodies for cash. A relatively obscure blogger,…

On July 26, 2017, President Donald Trump announced a ban on transgender individuals from joining the military. Trump’s announcement was met by praise from the Right and hate from the Left. In response, leftists continued to use their same-old Hitler comparisons and acted like this was the worst thing to happen in American history. But on the other side of the aisle, the religious right applauded this announcement and proclaimed that this was just another tactic in making America great again. Overall, I believe that the response from both sides of the political spectrum revealed that the Left continues to be shrouded in lunacy, and the Right doesn’t really understand what this ban could mean. Ultimately, everyone in America overreacted to an announcement that isn’t even policy. People on the Left and Right need to come terms with the fact that Trump’s announcement came in Tweets. This was not a House Bill, a Senate Bill, nor was it even a press conference, it was just another example of Trump’s…

Since announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Austin Petersen has piqued the interest of Missouri conservatives seeking a candidate to unseat left-wing incumbent Claire McCaskill. A candidate with national prominence like Petersen would initially appear to be an ideal nominee in one of the most closely watched races of 2018. However, the more Republicans will learn about Petersen the less they will like him. Here are five reasons (of many) why Austin Petersen is not fit to represent Missourians: Immigration: Petersen supports allowing countless illegal immigrants to come across the United States border and become citizens to vote in our elections. In a YouTube video titled “Austin Petersen on Immigration,” he proclaimed his support for open borders, a radical leftist position on immigration which would allow millions of unskilled illegals to flood across our border. Petersen also supports granting these illegals amnesty which would allow them to affect American elections. Abortion: Petersen claims to be pro-life. This assertion, however, is…

Once upon a time, a Republican president formulated a doctrine that had little to do with regime change, and demanded that countries previously protected by the US military look to their own defense. Quickly into his first term, then-President Richard Nixon in 1969 announced “the Nixon Doctrine” which asserted that the nation’s Cold War allies in Asia would have to provide for their own protection. This policy, which reversed the thrust of US foreign policy for the last 20 years, was linked to the president’s campaign promise for “peace with honor” regarding US forces in Vietnam. By 1968, even some Cold War hawks regarded the conflict as a costly quagmire in terms of American lives (by 1968, more than 250,000 American soldiers had died), and Nixon sought a way to keep the American commitment to resist communist aggression in Asia while at the same time getting American soldiers out of the conflict. Announced as Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan in 1969, the doctrine involved a phased withdrawal of American soldiers from…

In recent years, numerous states have been passing new reforms of the long-abused civil asset forfeiture in which police agencies seize private property without any due process. At least 11 states, plus the District of Columbia, have passed new reforms. Some reforms, such as those in New Mexico and Nebraska, prohibit asset forfeiture altogether in the absence of a criminal conviction. Other states have opted for a more incremental approach, and have settled for new mandates in which law enforcement agencies must publicly report what has been seized — with the intent of identifying abuse for possible additional future reforms. The Heritage Foundation has noted the significance of these reforms:

As we are well into the first year of the Trump administration, and leftists are still walking around in a dim haze of incredulity, I’d like to reflect a little on why the man was elected. As some of you have probably inferred from the title, I am (on paper) a “coastal elitist.” I was born and raised in New Jersey, I am college educated (holding both two undergraduate degrees and a graduate degree), and being that I read, exercise, and listen to classical music, I suppose my tastes run to the fairly “highbrow.” In practice, some of my other tastes and especially my finances, place me far outside the world of the elite. Perhaps it is my “being outside the box,” which is a polite way of saying “not having many people willing to associate with me” (because I’m a philosopher king, of course), that enables me to objectively view the out-of-nowhere political rise of Donald Trump. I myself was never 100 percent enamored by Trump, but I…

As always, we should begin by defining our terms: What is rape, and why is it bad? There is nothing inherently traumatic about a foreign object being inserted in the vagina. Women insert tampons in there several times a month. Moreover, a large majority of rapes are not forceful, so the concept of rape is not related to physical pain or mere penetration. Rapes can even occur without the victim being aware of it. Yet, rape is punished as severely as aggravated assault, such as breaking someone’s legs. Why is that? We punish rape for psychological reasons. Women who experience rape experience a loss of perceived autonomy over their reproductive outcomes. Our instincts have changed little since our hunter/gatherer times, so we often experience vestigial feelings originating from our past as tribesmen and tribeswomen. A woman inseminated by a man she did not choose prevents her from passing on the best quality genes. That is unless the man is more attractive than her, of course.

As a Latino in the conservative movement, I can honestly say that conservatives have not hit the right notes with minorities. This is mostly because leftists and Democrats have a way of conflating right-wing ideas with immoral acts such as murder and racism, thus scaring minorities into leaning liberal. Even though it should be easy for conservatives to refute such notions, it tends to come off as pretentious and even bigoted to everyone else. In order to actually get minorities to switch to conservatism, we must choose our words carefully on certain issues, and take advantage of their genuine concerns regarding life in America. When interacting with Latinos, conservatives usually come off as harmful due to hard-line positions on immigration and border security. To alleviate this burden, conservatives should change the diction they typically use to talk about these issues. For example, when we use the phrase “border security,” we sound as if Latinos and other groups of people coming over the border threaten our way of life. The…

One of the more transparently manipulative and hypocritical slogans used by Western Communist Parties in the mid 1930s to recruit allies for Stalin was specifically designed for Catholics: “You can still take Communion and love the Soviet Union.” Graham Greene, novelist, pundit, and above all, Catholic, embodied this slogan. Indeed, Greene’s attempts to link Catholicism with a Soviet Union that persecuted priests from the get-go predated this slogan. Since the 1920s, Greene had sought to merge his Catholic faith with his Communist one, which prompted George Orwell, a foe of both organized religion and communism, to label Green the first “Catholic fellow traveler.” But even today, an argument is made that Greene was hostile to Communism in whatever form it took until his death in 1991. This school of thought relies on criticisms Greene made toward the ideology throughout his life.

Contrary to the narrative of Donald Trump’s friends and foes alike, the phenomenon of “fake news” long precedes the 2016 presidential election, even if the moniker is of a fairly recent vintage. To deem an item reported by journalists a piece of “fake news” is not necessarily to say that it is patently false. Of course, fake news does not preclude outright lying on the part of “fake journalists”—those who are motivated not by a desire to inform the public as much as they are driven by political, financial, and/or professional considerations. What makes a fake journalist fake is their desire to advance their own agenda, or the agenda of the corporation or political party that signs their paychecks. Yet more often than not, fake news contains some truth. It is precisely this kernel of truth that it contains that makes it as effective as it is. In other words, fake news derives its identity more by what it veils than by what it unveils. Take, for example, the…

Conservatives today locate the origins of the “mainstream media” in the Watergate and Vietnam era; when every reporter since has wanted to have the presidency-toppling effect of a Woodward and Bernstein. But from Watergate on, the presidencies that reporters have wanted toppled have been exclusively Republican ones. Much of this partisanship had to do with the inclusion of New Leftist ideologues, ironically once anti-establishment toward the press, burrowing into the profession and the academia that trains future journalists. Conservatives are certainly correct that the profession today is dominated by leftists who never left the late sixties, where objectivity was an obstacle to their political goals and thus jettisoned; and these propaganda techniques continue today by the journalists who leftist academics indoctrinate as college students.

It’s always like conservatives and libertarians to take a good thing and ruin it unnecessarily. After the Anti-Defamation League–the leftist thought control agency–profiled controversial Rebel Media and Compound Media host Gavin McInnes as a racist and potential terror threat for founding the Proud Boys, he responded with a near-immediate purge of alt-right members from his pro-West fraternal organization. “For the record, #ProudBoys [Virginia] are not alt-right. Stop splitting the group w that sh-t. If you are a [Virginia] PB who is [alt-right], you’re not a [Virginia] PB,” McInnes wrote in a Tweet with ominous ramifications for his group as a whole, which is supposed to have local autonomy. McInnes certainly did the cause of freedom a favor by creating the Proud Boys, but it seems his creation has gotten out of hand. It caught on very quickly, and became a national phenomenon faster than anyone could have reasonably imagined. Looking at their old promotional video, it may have began as a complete joke. As a frequent Compound Media watcher, that…

Said the president: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and, at times, a policy-making arm of the Government. … [T]his quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.” This dire warning about the propensity of the Central Intelligence Agency to go rogue did not come from Trump, but rather Harry S. Truman. Truman’s call to “limit the CIA role to intelligence” was published in December 22, 1963 by the Washington Post (WaPo). The same newspaper is now decrying President Trump’s decision to “end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.” The move is a good one. The WaPo threw Russia into the reportorial mix purely to sully President Trump, and due to…

Thanks to at least nine opposing Republican senators, Congress left for its July 4 break without passing a replacement bill for Obamacare. The opposition from these Republicans was two-fold: Four conservatives thought the GOP bill on the table went too far in retaining government control over the medical insurance market, while five centrist members complained it doesn’t go far enough in providing federal funding for Medicaid in their states, and would leave 22 million Americans overall without medical insurance. The free-marketers in the party have countered the centrist Republicans by indicating that many of the 22 million who will not be insured under the new system are young people who were forced to buy Obamacare insurance. Why should they continue to be forced to buy what they don’t want and probably don’t need? Moreover, payment for Medicaid expenses will be left to the states, which will be free to deal with this arrangement as they see fit. And within a few years both medical premiums and the taxes currently…

Some observers have smugly claimed that it is impossible to have a reactionary movement. They say it would be like piecing a ruined cobweb back together or trying to set Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. For them, it is one item on a long list of impossibilities. If one supposes that reactionaries want to return to some glittering past in every particular and detail, then the critics are right; it cannot be done. Fortunately, we are not focused on bringing back the poke bonnet or illuminated manuscripts; that is to say, nobody is trying to revive the little irrelevancies of bygone eras. The reactionary goal is to return to the spirit of an age, not its particulars. We only need to extract what worked from the past and juxtapose it onto the present. It is a process of adapting the present to the past, rather than trying to impose the past onto the future. Perhaps the most compelling point against critics is that history provides examples of reactionary…

I haven’t wanted to write about the whole Donald Trump Jr. thing because the story is utter crap, but here I find myself writing about a crap story with nothing underpinning it but crap piled upon layer after layer of crap. The Democratic partisans, enraged liberals, and their lapdogs in the mainstream media have been salivating over this particular fake news story, which says more about them than it does about Trump Jr. and his father’s administration. Here’s something worth noting that won’t get brought up by MSNBC or CNN or the New York Times: Famed liberal stalwart Alan Dershowitz even says that the Trump Jr. story is crap. You may now be asking yourself, “Okay, it might be crap, but how is it fake news? Even Trump Jr. admitted to his own culpability by releasing his e-mails, doesn’t that mean it’s a true story?” Sure, I don’t dispute that a meeting occurred between Trump Jr. and some sleazy Russian lawyer and her sleazy Russian compatriots. It’s not fake…

The partial legalization of marijuana has not been particularly ideal. Thanks to high regulatory burdens on the marijuana-production industry, limitations on production volume, and high taxes, black markets have persisted within those states that have adopted a variety of legalization measures. Perhaps most burdensome has been ongoing federal banking regulations that essentially prohibit marijuana producers from using commercial banking services. The resulting reliance on physical cash has led in many cases to more robbery and inefficiencies within the cannabis industry. Nevertheless, even partial legalization has brought at least some of the benefits that one would expect. Cannabis products are now subject to commercial quality control. That is, a customer who walks into a dispensary or storefront now has a much better idea of what he’s buying. When cannabis sales took place only in the black market, one could only guess at the provenance of the product, and customers had no legal recourse in cases of fraud. One of the greatest benefits, from a laissez-faire perspective, has been the fact…

In a previous article, I wrote about how the war on drugs and the government monopoly on the legal system has created the Tragedy of the Commons in our justice system. Because legislators and police officers have every incentive to appear “tough on crime” but the cost of the sending a criminal to a courtroom is socialized, the courts have become increasingly backlogged. What that article did not cover is the related “commons problem” in the prison system and the consequences that follow. Where legislators and police officers have in-built incentives to send as many people through the courts as possible, a similar incentive is faced by judges and prosecutors to send defendants through the prison system. Because all judges and prosecutors share common access to prison space with no individual cost for doing so, there is zero incentive for the limitation on the sentence sought by the individual prosecutor or handed down by the individual judge.

When it imposed its net neutrality rules on the telecom industry, the FCC was fixing a problem that didn’t exist. While proponents of Net Neutrality have long claimed that the regulations are necessary to impose fairness for Internet usage, access to the Internet has only become more widespread and service today is far faster for users—including “ordinary” people—than it was twenty years ago. Nevertheless, when the FCC in recent months—now under pressure from the Trump Administration—announced that it may step back from net neutrality, supporters immediately began claiming that net neutrality was necessary to keep Internet access affordable and “fair.” In truth, net neutrality has never fostered fairness or better access for consumers, and has instead created conditions that will encourage less competition and more monopolistic power for large firms within the industry. Instead of relying on the marketplace to allocate goods, net neutrality ensures that politics will determine who gets what, instead. This is hardly a recipe for fairness or neutrality. In the marketplace, goods and services tend…

Over the past several months, the mainstream media and Washington elite have perpetuated conspiracy theories and demonstrably false narratives in an effort to distract and stymie the current administration from reforming America’s health care–and the claims are growing ever more outlandish. In one article, CNN teeth-clinchingly claimed that under the bill formerly known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA), rape and domestic violence could qualify as pre-existing conditions. In another, Salon asserted that women who undergo C-sections could be “monetarily punished” under the bill. Despite this propaganda campaign, President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress are working hard behind the scenes to erode the last vestiges of the disastrous Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially referred to as Obamacare–including the problematic Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). Opposition from both parties has formed against IPAB, a bureaucratic board with the authority to change Medicare policy since its creation through the Affordable Care Act. The board, consisting of fifteen presidentially-appointed members, exists solely to recommend yearly cuts to Medicare costs.

Now that House and Senate Republicans have released health care bills, I have come to one conclusion: the GOP is in need of major help writing a health care bill. They never seem to get it right, and they always fall short of making these bills conservative. Consequently, I have created a guideline that highlights the problems within the Senate and House bills, and how they can be fixed. Problem #1: Both House and Senate bills continue spending and subsidizing for poor people and states. Although it sounds moral to give the poor tax credits for health care, it will only hurt them in the long run. The moment insurers realize that the poor now have money to spend, they will raise prices to meet the overflow of demand. Eventually, health insurance will only become more expensive and the problem will be akin to rising college tuition rates. The worst part is that politicians have no sense of economics. To alleviate this problem, they will likely raise tax credits in…

It is now official: all of the work that the Young Americans for Liberty activists did in Michigan on their “Liberty Summer” for the “Clean Michigan Government” campaign was for naught. The “Clean Mi Govt” campaign for a part-time legislature, spearheaded by career politician Brian Calley to rehab his image for his upcoming run for Governor, has been a catastrophe on every imaginable level. Calley’s public image, already in the dumps because of his tenure as Lieutenant Governor next to infamous water-poisoning Governor Rick Snyder, has sunk even lower after his part-time legislature campaign came unglued under his watch. Last week, the Detroit News revealed the campaign’s extensive connections to entrenched lobbyists and dark money PACs. Worse yet, the miserable campaign gave a unique glimpse the corrupt underbelly of the national student liberty movement.

I have been asked to write a weekly column on British politics. Since I am writing for a largely American readership, and since Americans mostly know little of what happens outside their own country, I think it would be best if I were to begin with a brief overview not only of what is happening here, but also of what has been happening for quite some time. David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010 at the head of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. The Conservatives had won more seats than any other party in the House of Commons, but fallen short of an overall majority. Whether he governed the country well during the next five years is beside the point. What matters is that he governed effectively within the assumptions of British politics. He went into the 2015 General Election with the aim of getting an overall majority for the Conservative Party. His main difficulty was not in beating the Labour Party, which was in no position to beat him,…

In the wake of Donald Trump’s win, you might have noticed a new swamp spring up–one that Trump certainly wouldn’t want to drain. You were likely swamped with the same meme ad nauseum, comparing maps of “Trump’s America” and “Hillary’s America.” The meme-making quality: Trump’s America is far larger than Hillary’s precisely because it consists of those counties in which he won the majority of the vote, namely, rural areas. In contrast, Hillary Clinton won mostly the coastal US, especially the country’s largest cities, by wide margins. We can laugh at the radical different geographic spreads of each tally, but they underscore a deeper demographic problem. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 2 million votes, even though his geographic spread was far greater than Clinton’s. This is only possible because Clinton won the most populous areas of the US–the biggest cities. Trump was wildly unpopular in most of California (whose population centers are located in San Francisco and Los Angeles) and even his home state, New York (New…

Christopher Wray, President Donald Trump’s FBI director nominee, seems to be a perfectly nice man, but nothing he said during his July 12 confirmation hearings distinguishes him as someone who would reform former President Barack Hussein Obama’s Islamophilic FBI. President Trump ran on a set of ideas based around aggressively stopping Islamic terror. Like a fly-in-amber, the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) governing the Obama FBI guarantee to preserve the same systemic, intractable failures that unleashed mass murderers such as Omar Mateen or Syed Farook to maim and murder dozens of Americans. From Wray’s comments to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he made it clear how he’ll bravely break with President Trump, but indicated that he’s partial to his predecessor, James Comey. To wit, Wray said he sided with Comey in rejecting a domestic surveillance program in 2004, “… not because he knew the substance of the dispute,” but because of his affection for Comey. Given his unalloyed loyalty, Wray will be unlikely to remove from FBI training manuals the fiction…

Omitted from leftist narratives as to why those of their own defected to the anti-Communist side is how a single murder provoked the defection. Instead pro-Communists and “anti-anti-Communists” assign base motives to these supposedly mentally unstable drunks such as a desire for the latter to line their pockets and for a new appreciation of fascism. Ernest Hemingway, who sought a relationship with the Soviet secret police, used the greed argument against his one-time friend John Dos Passos for publicly accusing Communists during the Spanish Civil War of murdering Dos Passos’ friend, Jose Robles. Hemingway with help from the Soviet-directed loyalist government justified the murder because Robles was “a fascist spy” for Franco. Disgusted, Dos Passos became a fervent anti-Communist who later voted for Barry Goldwater.

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